The Daffodil Kill

Dear Teachers of the Younger Generations,

It’s the Daffodil Kill.  Spill the petals like clotted blood onto the history books.
Spit the gunpowder we saw to the students. Use it for creamer in your coffee,
as leather-lined clouds drool peach pits upon the window.                                                                                                                                                                                                           Be raw with it.  Peel your skin.  Stretch it over the windows as drapes. Eat glass so they can see right through you.  They’ll cry. 
It’s too much for them.  Twist knuckle hairs as you hold their hands. 
Tell them how to lose innocence, fold fitted sheets, get overtoo friendly aunts and uncles—at least they didn’t rape you—
how to pay taxes, stake poles to help blueberry trees.  Tell them
of diseases that take people you love and which cleaning supplies to use
to mop their piss off the floor when they’re half braindead.Learn how to mail letters and write checks, and that this
is how not to ruin the mood with your cryingas boys and girls push you into back seats with poison oak kisses
that make your skin scream.  Here’s how to clean those seats,
and it’s not easy.  Here’s a list of what to say in a job interview, how to reuse old shoeboxes, coach friends out of suicide
because it’s an old friend of yours, cut open shampoo bottles
to get more at the bottom, and how to mumble so your father spanks you in grocery stores because he’s tired of asking you to speak up. 
Stop speaking for three months.  Your voice was never important anyways. 
Play chicken with trains and win, study for the ACT, face death
on top of rickety ladders in foreign cities you do not know. Don’t slack off studying to have fun, get a job during summer,
learn how to open a bank account, and this is how to fight against a predator,
but if you lose then you better keep your mouth shut.  Play an instrument to learn a skill.  You can recycle two-liter soda bottles
by using them to grow tomatoes but do this so you don’t make a face
when eating the tomatoes, it’s insulting.  Learn that yellow eyeshadow
hides purple bruises (I didn’t hit you that hard, stop being such a baby) and live in the dark because the electricity bill was too high last month. 
Rake up pine straw to help your plants grow and prevent weeds. 
Watch your best friend from second grade rot her brains out
until she can’t speak a sentence in less than a minute, have survivor’s guilt because it could have been you.  Always remember to carry a spare tire
and learn how to love people that leave because you are not enough to stay. 
Become less.  This is how to season a cast-iron skillet,
recycle because we’re good people, and how to watch half of your friends
be thrown in jail, and do not visit them.  Here are some good scholarships
and some forms to sign up for the military at eighteen, even though
you can’t drink yet.  Roll your hands over the eggs in the store
to make sure they aren’t cracked.  Don’t flinch when your parents tell you
how they want to kill themselves.  Make lists before you go to the grocery store.
Mind your own business when your mother tears her shoes
trying to jump out of the car on the way to Thanksgiving.  Watch people be murdered and not see it on TV (but did you see that dress?) This is how to feed your pet dog, and this is how to bury it. Teach this to the students.  This isn’t Rose and Woes, this is the Daffodil Kill.  We weren’t all raised in the same soil. Everyone’s experiences will be different. When they look at the clock, because you’ve been rambling on for far too long,
eat it.  Eat seven, eight, and nine.  Collapse in clotted blood and petals. 

This poem is about: 
Our world
Guide that inspired this poem: 

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